-Wikipedia
Right on time
Loongarch (the ISA that debian is now supporting) has only been around since 2021. Previously Loongson used MIPS and another ISA known as LoongISA.
Stallman actually daily drove a Loongson MIPS-based notebook for a while.
In contrast, Western corporate execs have an event horizon between "next quarterly reports" and "vesting/bonus period", additionally in any sufficiently large organizations you will have fiefdom fights that are counterproductive to the company at large, and Western politicians can only think to "next important election", so basically a few months as well because there is always an election going on in some state or local division.
We have gotten societally incompatible with not just coming up with new ideas, but with maintaining what we already have. It's like in 1984 - we can't even think of such timeframes any more.
And no, I'm not calling for a dictatorship. I'm rather calling for dissolution of the stock market for speculation, and for consolidating elections to once every four years so that politicians have time to cool down from the constant campaign hype pressure.
You talk about "western" politicians, but this point feels like it only really applies to the US with its ridiculous two-year cycle.
The big tech companies ran without profit for a long time. People worried a lot about that but they did it anyway.
this would do so much untold good, i hope i live to see it
Also seems russia is interested to do some stuff based on LoongArch
just found one on JD: 14inch, LoongArch 3A6000, 16G mem, 512G storage, 4G GPU storage, sold for 6499RMB around 920USD
And I believe Debian was the only distro I was able to run on it back then too. Also NetBSD.
I ended up giving it to someone at the local hacker space. It's fun to try but it's not a daily driver.
Didn't Stallman use one as daily driver for a while?
https://www.alpinelinux.org/posts/Alpine-3.21.0-released.htm...
Nah, we added the loong64 in Debian already in 2023:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/08/msg00...
It was just promoted to being a release architecture.
My college friend participated in the Google Summer of Code 2009, migrating openSUSE to MIPS. The CPU they used was an earlier version of Longson (forgot which one).
https://hackweek.opensuse.org/projects/bootstrap-opensuse-on...
It was announced recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/1044496/) that Apt, the Debian package manager, would require Rust by May 2026.
It does look like LoongArch is a supported target of Rust at Tier 2: https://doc.rust-lang.org/beta/rustc/platform-support/loonga...
In fact, Rust's targets page is much bigger than I remembered! Good work
Yes.
> It was announced recently (https://lwn.net/Articles/1044496/) that Apt, the Debian package manager, would require Rust by May 2026.
No, that was just the wish expressed by one of the APT maintainers. No actual decision has been made yet.
Not sure how they compare exactly. And of course it never hurts to have two players in the game.
I just meant I've heard a lot more about stuff going on in the RISC-V field in China. A lot of it is focused on the embedded stuff yes but not only there.
It takes several days to build the gcc-15 package in riscv64 but just a few hours on loong64.
This will improve in 2026, with the first chips integrating RVA23 microarchitectures, such as the Tenstorrent Atlantis SoC and development board, with Ascalon, announced for 2026Q2.
I wonder if there is a way to get them from Taiwan / Korea. I can’t go to mainland China.
https://loongfans.cn/en/pages/intro.html#i-m-sold-where-can-...
> Even though the Loongson Corporation has yet to release the remaining volumes of the LoongArch manual, thanks to a wealth of public information such as publicly available QEMU and Linux changes, "undisclosed" information such as instruction encoding and behaviors is, in effect, already public. The absence of manuals can no longer hinder optimization efforts by The People.
If the architecture is still undocumented, I would not consider Debian’s move to be wise.
